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Air Taxis and Self-Driving Aircraft: Aviation Industry Faces Its Future

Aerospace companies are developing forms of air transport that were widely dismissed as science fiction just a few years ago

A small executive jet comes in for a landing in view of a Boeing Co. 787 Dreamliner passenger aircraft, during preparations for the Farnborough International Airshow 2018 in England.
Photo:
Simon Dawson/Bloomberg News

FARNBOROUGH, England—Traditional plane deals grabbed headlines at the Farnborough International Airshow this past week. But a handful of futuristic air-travel concepts signaled a new excitement coursing through the industry.

Global aerospace companies are grappling with new technology from self-flying planes to electrically-powered aerial taxis, perhaps the industry’s biggest tech surge since the dawn of the jet age in the late 1950s.

Much of the attention at the biennial aerospace jamboree was on still-developing forms of air transport that were widely dismissed as science fiction barely a few years ago.

Such next-generation projects are a contrast with the industry’s recent fixation on designing and building more fuel-efficient planes, such as
Boeing Co.’s
BA 3.77%
787 Dreamliner and
Airbus SE’s
A350 long-range jet. Fast-selling single-aisle jets, variants of the Boeing 737 and Airbus’s A320 and the industry’s workhorses, have been the stars of recent shows.

Those new planes were dreamt up when the industry’s future seemed focused in kerosene-burning, tube-and-wing shaped aircraft; the recent technological wizardry of such planes is in their fuel conservation, range and quiet engines.

But a look at what generated the most excitement in Farnborough indicates another future for the industry is coming into view.

At a Boeing briefing on the future of next-generation air transportation, Chief Technology Officer Greg Hyslop predicted urban flying vehicles would be able to transport passengers and goods relatively soon. Although it isn’t clear whether they would be fully autonomous, or how regulators would manage air traffic, Mr. Hyslop boldly called it a “new era of transportation and mobility.”

Such craft “are going to start flying around in the next few years” without requiring airports, at least in a testing capacity, he said. “I don’t think we’re talking decades.”

Mitch Snyder, president of Textron Inc.’s Bell helicopter unit, told reporters he expected several of the company’s fully-autonomous models would serve military and commercial customers within a few years.

A contingent of space companies also exhibited at the show. Britain’s space agency announced plans to create a spaceport from which to launch rockets. Even space enthusiasts were surprised “by the sheer interest in space, the excitement it’s created” among show goers, said Patrick Wood, who runs
Lockheed Martin Corp.’s
space operations in the U.K.

Skeptics emphasize that some of these high-profile concepts have been touted before, only to fail. More than a decade ago, various companies promised fleets of small passenger planes to serve as air taxis buzzing between cities. That still hasn’t happened.

Now, though, the biggest, most-respected names in the industry are piling into some of these unconventional projects. Since 2003, closely held Aerion Corp. has been marketing its concept of the fastest business jet ever. This year,
General Electric Co.
and Lockheed Martin are part of the project.

What’s also changed is how seriously leading plane makers are taking the cutting-edge technology. Executives at Boeing and Airbus have watched entrepreneur Elon Musk upend the car business and, much closer to home, the traditional rocket business with the success of his Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX. They hope to avoid similar disrupters affecting various other parts of their business.

British aircraft engine maker
Rolls-Royce Holdings
PLC is a home-crowd favorite at Farnborough, and one seen as tradition-bound. This year, though, it is investing in hybrid-electric plane technology and showing off its own mini-electric airborne taxi helicopter concept.

SpaceX’s example resonates for startups such as Boom Technology Inc., which is developing an entirely business-class supersonic airliner.

“If I hadn’t seen [Mr. Musk’s] successes, I probably wouldn’t have started,” Blake Scholl, the Denver, company’s founder and chief executive, said. “New entrants in aerospace can do things that the incumbents can’t.”